Are there any good digraph width measures?

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Publication:3058698




Abstract: Several different measures for digraph width have appeared in the last few years. However, none of them shares all the "nice" properties of treewidth: First, being emph{algorithmically useful} i.e. admitting polynomial-time algorithms for all MS1-definable problems on digraphs of bounded width. And, second, having nice emph{structural properties} i.e. being monotone under taking subdigraphs and some form of arc contractions. As for the former, (undirected) MS1 seems to be the least common denominator of all reasonably expressive logical languages on digraphs that can speak about the edge/arc relation on the vertex set.The latter property is a necessary condition for a width measure to be characterizable by some version of the cops-and-robber game characterizing the ordinary treewidth. Our main result is that emph{any reasonable} algorithmically useful and structurally nice digraph measure cannot be substantially different from the treewidth of the underlying undirected graph. Moreover, we introduce emph{directed topological minors} and argue that they are the weakest useful notion of minors for digraphs.









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